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Enterprise Technology Trend Forecast For 2024

Enterprise technology trend forecast for 2024 

These are the technology trends we expect to see, front and centre, as organisations adapt to an ever-evolving risk and opportunity landscape in 2024. 

Artificial Intelligence 

It doesn’t take an expert to predict that AI is going to be on a lot of organisations’ priority lists for 2024. We’re expecting to see a lot of companies digging deeper to: 

  • fully understand the business case for investment 
  • figure out how and where AI fits into their operations 
  • identify new opportunities to leverage AI to supercharge human efficiency, accuracy and even creativity 

The key areas of AI that will take centre stage are: 

  • Image Recognition – using AI to identify everything from products on shelves to defects in production lines and faces in digital media.  
  • Speech Recognition – using AI to record, transcribe, or even monitor live speech during calls or conferences; provide real time translation and/or closed captioning; take dictation and/or voice commands and more. 
  • Chatbots and ChatOps – using AI as a first-line customer-facing tool (including automated customer interactions and brand representation on social media) and an internal business tool (tracking and documenting communications and KPIs, responding to common questions, and assisting with help desk requests and triage). 
  • Natural Language Generation – using AI to generate recurring and/or formulaic content like reports (complete with explanatory descriptions); customised content like product or service descriptions tailored to specific user profiles; and predictive text in email and word processors. 
  • Sentiment Analysis – using AI to analyse customer sentiment and behaviour trends and identify the responsible influences; identify and cultivate beneficial relationships (e.g. influencers); and gauge employee morale. 

As AI continues to evolve, we also expect AI-as-a-service to become more prevalent. This will enable businesses to experiment with AI across a much wider range of applications, with less risk and a much lower upfront investment.  

The challenge, of course, will be doing so in a secure and compliant manner – an area in which we expect to continue delivering significant value. 

Data Management 

Organisations are becoming increasingly aware of the value of (and risk to) their data, and the opportunities that lie in the strategic management of its storage, accessibility and governance.  

We’re expecting 2024 to bring a continued focus on: 

  • Data cost and value optimisation – controlling spiralling data storage costs while optimising insights, analytics and accessibility to extract greater overall value. 
  • Data democratisation – implementing solutions that enable non-data-literate professionals to discover and analyse information more effectively, without requiring the assistance of a specialist data analyst. 
  • Data security and governance – extending IT’s ability to manage threats like shadow-IT, while facilitating secure and appropriate access to compliantly-stored data for ongoing organisational use. 
  • Data culture – encouraging organisation-wide data-centric behaviours to normalise analytics-based (rather than opinion-based) decision-making. 
  • Data literacy – training users to access, interpret, create and share data and analytics accurately, appropriately and effectively. 

As part of this data-centric movement, we expect Power Platform’s Microsoft Fabric adoption to pick up considerable momentum. Microsoft Fabric’s data integration, data engineering, data warehousing, data science and real time data analytics capabilities will be invaluable for organisations looking to achieve the same level of control and insight into their data management as PowerBI delivers on the business intelligence front. 

Security and Resilience 

As AI-enabled cyberattacks push the number of successful data thefts and breaches sky high, encryption, authentication, and disaster recovery (for worst-case scenarios) will remain hot topics in 2024. 

Key focus areas will include: 

  • Centralised Identity and Access Management – ensuring consistent controls across multi-cloud environments to reduce the risk of unauthorised access. 
  • Robust Data Encryption – at rest and in transit 
  • Unified Security Policies – achieving clarity and consistency across all cloud platforms 
  • Proactive Threat Detection & Response – deploying precision tools and establishing clear procedures to identify and rapidly respond to potential security breaches. 

Sustainable (Green) Cloud Computing 

More and more organisations are prioritising sustainability as they publicly work towards reducing their carbon footprint and achieving net zero emissions. Given the high energy requirements of storing large data volumes with appropriately fast processing power, we expect to see many of these businesses migrating from carbon-heavy legacy IT infrastructure to environmentally conscious cloud providers like Microsoft in 2024. 

With Microsoft’s commitment to being carbon negative by 2030, the immediate carbon footprint reduction these migrations will achieve will only improve in the long term. That said, the benefits of a strategically planned migration should extend well beyond the environmental. 

We look forward to helping all our migration clients capitalise on the invaluable opportunity to reimagine and re-engineer their environment for optimal returns on their cloud investment. Think: more robust security, improved compliance and enhanced productivity, as well as greater alignment with current and future organisational goals. 

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